Deposition of scale or waxes causing fouling of pipelines is a costly and common problem in the oil industry. Compositions such as wax inhibitors are sometimes used to reduce the rate of wax deposition in pipelines. The efficiency of the inhibitors depends on several factors such as the right chemistry, injection or introduction at the correct location, targeting the right operating conditions and testing appropriately. Bench or lab-scale testing of wax deposition is useful for screening and measuring the efficiency of various inhibitor chemicals. It is known however that bench top tests such as cold finger tests, while useful to qualitatively gauge chemical performance, may not be useful to quantitatively predict the performance of a chemical under field operating conditions. This is because the operating parameters such as the temperature difference, heat flux, and shear rates experienced in the field cannot be reproduced in such bench top devices simultaneously. Furthermore, electrochemical cells in the prior art are based on laminar flow and well defined analytical solutions for the flow field, concentration gradients, etc.
There is a need for a testing apparatus for qualifying inhibitor compositions used to reduce scale/wax deposition in pipelines, capable of quantitatively predicting the performance of various inhibitors under more realistic field operating conditions. There is also need for a testing apparatus for electrochemical cells that uses a turbulent flow field.